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United Arab EmiratesHybrid5 months ago
Cohere

Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience

Cohere·Staff / L6
Result
Rejected
Interview date
5 months ago
Timespan
3 weeks
Difficulty
Difficult

Interview process

The system design interview was data collection, SFT and RL stages. It went well for me. It was focused on LLM post training techniques. The ML coding was worst for me although I practiced the same question but using PyTorch and doing without PyTorch and without any documentation was challenging for me.

  • Recruiter screen
  • Technical interview
  • Take-home project

Interview rounds

3 questions across 2 rounds

Technical interview

2 questions

Question types asked

Specific questions asked

Decode tokens from LLM using top K sampling without using PyTorch

Design knowledge distillation of models. Design LLM post training pipeline.

Take-home project

1 question

Question types asked

Specific questions asked

Present a paper from a list provided by them

Interview tips

Brush up numpy knowledge. Every round would be on LLM or related to it. They focus heavily on LLM. The paper presentation is unique in the process for this type of role. Talk to different PhD candidates on how to present a paper well.

Company culture

I liked that the team was focused on post training. You need to work with the frontier model team which is cool and has lot of scope for learning. The remote culture attracted me.

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